The absent-present curriculum, or how to stop pretending not to know

That curriculum is far more than the policy documents and lesson plans that ostensibly guide the work that teachers do is a truism of curriculum studies. There is a plethora of concepts and frameworks for examining the many different aspects of what counts as curriculum and what shapes, in some way or another, educational experience. As editors, we are often struck not just by the range of concepts, but also by the range of definitions of concepts such as the “hidden” curriculum (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2017). This broad constellation of concepts and frameworks helps us to understand that there is more to curriculum than the curriculum, and that there are curricular forces that shape educational experience in far more profound ways than what is expressed in official documents and other written texts. As educators, however, we are often pressed by the exigencies of the institutions in which we work as well as by the political urgency of the work we do. Whether we work in universities or schools, or whether our work is situated in communities, or focused on global movements, attending to the absent presences of curriculum is often not just challenging, but at times beyond our capacities, resources, and time constraints. And thus, we often find ourselves working as if other forces were not having a profound effect on our work as educators, and even, to borrow from the title of the opening article in this issue, “pretending not to know” that such forces exist (see Okello, this issue). The four articles in this issue of CI offer us a lens through which to consider dimensions of curriculum that are not just hidden from our usual approaches or perceptions, but that profoundly shape educational experience. These absent presences, like elephants in a room, are often so overwhelmingly powerful in shaping educational experience that to acknowledge them might lead us to give up on any attempt to counter or resist their force. Racism, sexism, genderism, ableism, labour exploitation, and colonialism, to name only a few of the ideologies and social processes that shape educational experiences, are so ubiquitous and yet often so stealth that as educators we can feel compelled to act as if they are not there; we might pretend that we don’t even know how they impact us and ignore their absent-presence. Whether for the sake of efficiency, practicality, or to manage the sheer feeling of powerlessness in the face of such forces, we might pretend not to know they are even there at all and proceed as if otherwise.